Creating and updating site columns in MOSS publishing site

Question

I have created a feature, a publishing site, in Visual Studio to MOSS - this feature contains a masterpage, some pages, some site columns etc. I have also created a site collection based on my template.

I have several times updated my mastepage and pages with succes. Now I want to update my site columns, adding some columns, but these changes does not appear in my site collection. If I delete my site collection and create a new the new one gets the correct site columns. What am I missing in my update?

I am using WSPBuilder to build and update my feature.

Answer 1

When you deploy your updated package are you deactivating and reactivating the Feature that provisions the site columns? If you don't, the site columns won't show.

Answer 2

There is no way to include this is the wsp, you could however script the deployment of the .wsp and after it has been deployed (i.e. retracted old version, added new version, then deployed to correct web apps) include an

stsadm -o deactivatefeature -url URL -name FEATURENAME

and

stsadm -o activatefeature -url URL -name FEATURENAME 

In the deployment script after all the stsadm calls to deploy the solution.